Medic: Saving Lives - From Dunkirk to Afghanistan

by John Nichol

  The brews kept coming and sleep went by the board as they began to work on the Bluff Cove survivors. Those patients with the worst burns needed to be rehydrated, with massive intravenous infusions. Slowly, the life dripped back into blackened bodies, while morphine took the edge off indescribable pain. Surgeons moved from bed to bed slitting bloated fingers to drain away fluid. Flamazine, a cooling white cream of silver and sulpha, was applied. Hands were enclosed in sterile plastic bags to avoid the chafing of bandages. Jolly remembered the concrete floor of the one-time whaling station being ankle-deep in torn packets and cellophane wrapping from the hundreds of dressings used that day and night. The Flamazine ran out on the very last patient.

  The survivor in the worst state, according to the doctor, was Guardsman Simon Weston, whose disfigured face and indomitable courage would become, for many, the enduring emblem of the Falklands conflict. The islands were regained and honour restored, but the cost, counted in scars both physical and mental, was immense. Jolly is frank – the sight of Weston when he was brought into Ajax Bay was terrifying. His swollen face and scalp were red and blistered. His hair was charred. Nerve endings were exposed and the pain so severe that morphine had little effect. He pleaded to be put out of his misery, not for the first time. ‘When the bomb exploded, I watched, transfixed with horror, as my hands melted, the skin bubbling on the bone. I was suffocating in the smoke and I was on fire. I begged someone for a rifle so I could shoot myself.’8 He had got away only by running over the blackened bodies of dead and dying comrades. Most were gonners – only eight of his platoon of thirty survived that day. His wish to join them, for his suffering to end, was ignored by Jolly’s team. Instead, he was treated with a radical technique, an anaesthetic that relaxed him into a pain-free trance. Eventually, he recovered (though it would take some seventy-five operations and skin grafts) and, though life had changed for ever for the self-confessed rugby-playing, beer-swilling, woman-chasing Welshman, he still had a life. He was, said Jolly, a shining example of how extraordinary ‘ordinary’ people can be and of the powerful resources deep within humans that can be tapped in extremis.

  That night after Galahad and Tristram were hit, resources, both physical and mental, were stretched to the limit. There were stretchers side by side, wall to wall, at Ajax Bay. ‘We couldn’t actually stand on the floor,’ medic Mick Jennings recalled. ‘We had to walk on the stretchers.’ There was a lot of fear among the burns victims. ‘Am I going to look like Niki Lauda?’9 one kept asking plaintively. What could anyone say to comfort him? The sadness of these blighted young lives left Jennings feeling wrecked. Nor was there any consoling thought that this was as bad as things could get. Over all this dedicated life-saving hung an air of menace. The Argentinian airforce had caused all this havoc with just a couple of bombs. Their tails were up. It was inconceivable that they would not try again. As stillness finally settled over the rows of semi-naked men in makeshift cots and stretcher racks in every corner of the hospital and weary medics stood down for a while from their duties, it seemed inevitable that, at first light, another aerial attack would be launched against one British position or another. Perhaps the over-flowing Ajax Bay would be the next target. Jolly feared the worst. He had come through the testing Sir Galahad experience by the skin of his teeth, but could he cope with any more casualties?

  ‘I looked at the ghostly, Flamazine-covered faces of the young Welsh Guardsmen, hair and eyebrows singed, fingers like sausages, swollen and damaged. My eyes met theirs, and cracked and blistered lips parted in vain attempts to smile. I knew that somehow I had to get them out of here before the next air raid and away to the cool comfort, the clean sea air and the devoted nursing of our hospital ship.’ But it would need a massive airlift to get them all out to the Uganda, and when he asked for helicopters, he was told they were all earmarked for the next phase in the advance to Stanley. He was torn, the medical man and the soldier at odds within him. ‘I shook my head in disbelief, aware of the need to get this war finished quickly but also of the more immediate needs of these tough and courageous young Welsh Guardsmen who were my charges.’

  While the brass hats deliberated and dithered (and eventually said no to diverting any aircraft for this purpose), Jolly was rescued from his predicament by the crew of a navy helicopter. They had been elsewhere on East Falkland when the Galahad was hit and now flew into Ajax Bay to be briefed on what had happened. The doctor piled on the emotional pressure as he escorted the pilot round the rows of casualties. One glimpse was enough for the airman to make up his mind. He pulled his gloves out of the pocket of his flying suit. There was work to do, he said, and the sooner he started the better.

  His first job was to locate the Uganda, which for some reason was out of radio contact. Then he began the evacuation, beginning with Simon Weston. The medic escorting him had a note in his pocket from Jolly for the ship’s medical director – stand by for another 167!10 It was going to be a slow process, back and forward, with just one helicopter, but then, out of the blue-grey sky, another pitched up. The cheery pilot – ‘I hear you have a problem, sir’ – offered to take a load of casualties to the Uganda in between his designated duties. The word was clearly out, and soon more and more helicopters were overhead and buzzing in, loading up and lifting off with human cargoes to deliver into the safe hands of the hospital-ship nurses. Within a few hours, the job was done. Every one of the wounded was away, safe between clean sheets and secure from marauding Argentinian fighters. When a military liaison officer arrived to tell Jolly that the generals and brigadiers had decided that he couldn’t have any helicopters after all, not a single patient was left. He was greeted by stacks of empty stretchers – and a look of deep satisfaction on Rick Jolly’s face.

  Meanwhile, the magnitude of all that had happened was forcing its way into the consciousness of Sergeant Naya – and leaving him troubled. His exhaustion was overwhelming, and he certainly deserved the sleep of the righteous as he lay down in his billet in an empty Falkland islander’s house at Fitzroy. He, of all people, had absolutely nothing to reproach himself for. His conduct had been exemplary. But this did not stop his mind racing, refusing him the rest he so desperately needed. ‘What had happened? What had gone wrong? How were my mates, some of whom I still hadn’t seen and didn’t know if they were alive or dead? Did I do enough?’ It was hard getting the sense of death out of his system. In the twilight the next evening, he stood on the cliffs above Bluff Cove and stared, mesmerized, at the eerie red glow coming from what remained of the Galahad. Tears rolled down his face. ‘She burnt there for days. We all expected her to go up in one almighty explosion, break in half and sink, but she never did.’ The entire bridge had caved in and the topside was black and charred, except in patches where the paint had peeled off and the metal underneath was shining in the last rays of the sun. Naya was overwhelmed with sadness. Pride in what he had done that day would come later. He wasn’t a hero, he maintained. ‘I just did my job. Yes, I could certainly have got off the Galahad straight away, but it never crossed my mind to do so. These men were my mates, my family, they were hurting and looking to me as a medic for help. I did it without thinking.’

  His thoughts now turned to his real family, his wife and four children back home in Britain. The attack on the Galahad and the number of dead and wounded would probably be front-page news already. He wanted to reassure them that he was OK, but there would be no means to do so for a while. ‘It wasn’t until we got to Stanley that I was able to sneak off to the Cable and Wireless office and send a telegram. Just a few words, “I’m safe and well – Love, P.” It cost me every penny I had, but it was worth it.’

  For other wives and children, however, the tidings were the worst they could be. Patricia Nutbeem, wife of RAMC major Roger Nutbeem, was in the kitchen getting her two children ready for school when she glanced out of the window and saw the padre and an officer approaching her door. ‘Every soldier’s wife knows immediately what that means,’ she recalled. Her husband
had been one of the first of the forty-eight to die, caught out on the open deck when the attack planes came, and cut down by shrapnel. She was all the more shocked by his death because she had never thought that, as a medic, he would be in the front line.

  Five-year-old Kathryn remembered being bundled off to school that morning without explanation. ‘My granny collected me in the afternoon and brought me home. My mother sat me down and told me what had happened. She was crying. Then, apparently, I wanted to get out pictures of my dad and go through the family photo albums. I must have been told I wasn’t going to see him again, so I wanted to look at his picture.’11 Her life would never be the same again. The Galahad had taken her hero, her own special knight in shining armour. Finding him and fixing him in her memory would be a quest she took into her adult years. Such are the perpetual scars of war.

  11. Gaining the High Ground

  ‘A soldier goes out and fetches in a comrade under fire and he gets a medal for bravery. But we are always under shellfire and can’t dump our stretchers and run for it to a safe spot. We have to plod on, slipping and sliding, shells bursting above and in the earth around us. It’s God’s mercy that we get through. But we have the patient to think of. Our quickness probably means his life.’ So recalled a private in the RAMC who was a stretcher-bearer in the trenches in the Great War.1 He spoke a great truth. In war, there is nothing more noble than putting your life at risk to save another’s. Yet that was the daily – hourly! – stock in trade of the medic. Sixty-five years on from that private’s impassioned job description, on a battlefield a long, long way from the Somme, but similar in terms of the cold, the wet and the danger, stretcher-bearers were once again showing their mettle. They were a derided bunch, carved from the ranks of cooks, bandsmen, barmen, store clerks and the like, whom fighting soldiers were prone to look down on. Lying on a stretcher, being hauled to safety, the wounded got a different perspective: they were the ones looking up now, in admiration.

  The final battles of the Falklands campaign had much in common with those of the First World War, a thought that went through the mind of 3 Para’s Private Mark Eyles-Thomas as he fixed his bayonet, stood up and began to advance towards Mount Longdon, one of a chain of 500-foot-high rocky ridges that surrounded and shielded the islands’ capital, Port Stanley. The terrain might be different, but the technique was the same. ‘I could see men to my left and to my right advancing in a continuous straight line. It seemed ironic that, despite all our modern technology and weaponry, in the end it all came down to men fighting each other, face to face, hand to hand, yard by yard.’2 This had been planned as a surprise attack, which was why there was no artillery bombardment to precede it. The men of 3 Para had tabbed many miles, over hostile terrain, at top speed, to get to this point in the north of the island where they could penetrate the Argentinian lines. Longdon was believed to be lightly defended. Stormed in the dark without warning, it should easily fall.

  Sergeant Major John Weeks had his doubts about this. Before they set out he had warned the men in his company that some of them would not be coming off the hill. ‘It’s going to be hand-to-hand fighting,’ he told them bluntly. ‘You’re going to have live stuff exploding all around you. If you believe in Christ, now’s the time to have a little talk to Him. I’m certainly going to say a little prayer myself.’3

  They marched towards the mountain for more than an hour, beneath a rising moon, no talking, the only sound a rhythmic swishing as their boots cut through the grass. In the swirling wind there were flecks of snow. The Falklands winter was kicking in. Then they came to the lower slopes of the mountain and began the uphill slog, still in silence. But what had not been put into the pre-battle calculations was the extent to which the area had been mined. Suddenly, there was a flash and a bang, and a violent scream echoed around the crags and rock runs. At the front of his platoon, Corporal Brian Milne had stood on a mine. Longdon erupted. From well-hidden, well-placed, stone-walled bunkers, the alerted enemy – in battalion-strength, not just a company, as had been expected – poured out mortar and bullets, the empty night suddenly bursting with flares and bright green tracer. It mingled with the red tracer of the fire now being furiously returned by the Paras. It was just like Guy Fawkes Night, according to Weeks.

  He was thankful that most of the Argentinians had been asleep when the mine went off. ‘What came at us was bad enough, so if they’d all been awake, they would have wiped us off the face of the mountain.’ Some platoons had made it to the heart of the Argentinian defensive line before their presence was revealed, and instantly the fighting was close up and personal. Eyles-Thomas lay flat on the ground, aware the mine that had downed Milne was certainly not the only one out there. He could hear the groans of the injured corporal ahead of him. His pal, Jas Burt, crawled forward to help the injured man, and Eyles-Thomas followed. Jas took the corporal’s morphine syrette from around his neck and jabbed it into him, but the painkiller was having little effect, so he injected his own into Milne as well. It was a remarkably selfless thing to do. He might need morphine for himself if he was hit… when he was hit. But, for now, they had to leave the wounded man. Their priority was to maintain the momentum of the attack. Shouting out for a ‘Medic!’ they pushed on up the hill.

  Brian Faulkner, the colour sergeant in charge of 3 Para’s aid post, already had his men just yards behind the action. In the long slog to the start line of the operation, they had been donkeys, carrying supplies of arms and ammunition on their backs in their other battlefield role. Now they reverted to being medics. He was conscious of how nervous his band of co-opted cooks, REME (Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers) fitters and pay clerks was feeling as they waited with him in the rear. ‘We knew this was going to be the big battle, the major occasion.’4 The noise of the first mine and Milne’s scream of agony shattered their anxious contemplation of what lay ahead. The radio crackled into life: ‘Starlight, Starlight’ – the aid post’s call sign – ‘move up the mountain…!’ Faulkner and his men rushed forward, hearts pumping, adrenalin surging, running, as they later realized, through mines. But they were more concerned with what was going on over their heads than at their feet. ‘We came under intense fire. It was just like being on a machine-gun firing range, except that we were the targets. We could see the lads going down ahead, blokes being killed, losing limbs and having their intestines blown out. Oh my God, this is real, I was thinking. I had never experienced anything like it before.’

  Medic Phil Probets was the first to reach the wounded Milne. ‘He was yelling his head off, and I knew I had to stop him, because the enemy were homing in on where the noise was coming from. The mine had blown his lower calf off and most of his heel. The cold was keeping him alive, because it had contracted the blood vessels and slowed the bleeding. I packed the gaping hole as best I could, then put on an inflatable splint to keep everything in place.’5 As he worked away the thought struck him that he was indeed in a minefield. ‘Brilliant,’ he remembered thinking. ‘How am I going to get out of this?’

  That wasn’t his only problem. As he examined the wounded corporal, he had to put his torch on to see what he was doing, and the light was a lure for snipers up in the rocks. ‘It didn’t make me very popular with the Toms, but I had no alternative.’ As for those worries about how to get safely out of the minefield, they were resolved for him in time-honoured military fashion. Having stabilized Milne, he was ordered forward to deal with more casualties. He crossed his fingers and ‘got my arse out of there’. But the risk he took was demonstrated when, hours later, a Snowcat trundled in on its all-terrain tracks to pick up the corporal, the driver jumped out, detonated a mine and lost his leg.

  In those first few hours of the ten-hour battle for Mount Longdon, the casualties were of an order the British army had not sustained or experienced for decades. It was not just the weight of numbers but the intensity that was new. There was no stopping when a man was down, as there had been, for example, in Northern Ireland. The toll was r
elentless. Faulkner and 2 Para medical officer Captain John Burgess set up the regimental aid post in a sheltered gully beneath a rockface on the western side of the mountain. From here the stretcher-bearers were sent out to bring back the wounded. With constant calls for help coming in over the radio, Faulkner directed his five teams of stretcher-bearers to where they lay. ‘Go left, go centre, go right, go as far forward as you can and start picking them up.’ They went without hesitation, he recalled, filled with pride at their bravery under the most intense fire. Leave the dead, he told them. Get the ones who still have a chance. One bearer was blown up more than once bringing in the same casualty, hit by the blast from a shell, picking himself up, making it a few more yards and then being blown away again. And once he had made it, he had a quick swallow of tea to shake the ringing out of his ears and steady his nerves and then went straight back up the hill again. ‘They all had to,’ said Faulkner. ‘The guys up front were fighting hand to hand and couldn’t bring the wounded back. They were relying on us.’

  The pressure was relentless. Tom Onions, converted from army chef to stretcher-bearer and seeing action for the first time, went back and forward across open ground on autopilot. ‘The stream of casualties was endless. Go up, pick up the guys, come down with them, then back up there again through the firing and the explosions. Parachute flares going up and flickering. Yelling and screaming all around you. I was scared all right, but it was what we had to do.’ Around him he saw scenes from a horror film – a phosphorus grenade exploding in an enemy bunker and an Argentinian sniper running out blazing from head to foot, before a Para finished him off with a rifle volley. A quarter of a century later, the image of that killing, the first he ever witnessed, was still stuck in his head like a bad dream.